How it was made

The idea

Most trading games hide a spreadsheet behind a shop window. This one tries to be the spreadsheet's real thing: a small world where goods are made, carried, eaten and burned by people and by you, where a market you flood actually stays flooded, and where the way out of a crash is that somebody has to walk the grain over the hill. The rules are simple to say and hard to game: nothing appears or disappears without a cause.

The rules we keep

• The server is the only authority. Every price, trade and position is decided on the server. The client just draws it.
• No magic. Goods enter the world by production and leave by use. When a town has too much or too little, its lord sends traders on foot to fix it, slowly.
• No fighting, no death. Danger is a roving bandit gang that takes a slice of what you carry. You can always get up and walk on.
• Slow and steady. Getting rich is not the goal; getting better at the world is. Animals, books and tools are things to save for.
• Everything tunable. 702 numbers (prices, speeds, taxes, hunger, how patient a town is) live on an admin dashboard rather than in the code.

How it is built

A Windows desktop game (Electron) drawing a first-person 3D world with Three.js, talking to a PHP and MySQL server. Buildings and people are glTF models from CC0 asset packs, with a shared skeleton so characters animate together. There is no server loop: the world is timestamps, and each town catches up on the time that has passed whenever someone looks at it.

A balance simulator runs whole worlds with fake clocks to check that shelves stay stocked, that traders earn what they should, and that a market dump is cleaned up in a few hours. The test suites cover accounts, trading, travel, robbery, politics, crafting and the living economy.

Where we are

An early test, and a playable one (version 0.5.2). You can make a merchant, trade between twelve towns, walk the roads, ride and hitch animals and carts, learn skills, craft soulbound gear, join a company, take delivery contracts and errands from the people of the towns, send pigeons, and watch a world that moves on a real clock. The economy has been tuned by running whole simulated worlds overnight, from 8 to 100 players, so that a careful merchant earns a steady living, a careless one loses a little, and nobody stays broke for long. Right now we are adding more contracts and stories for the town folk, polishing gear and screens, and getting real players in to try it. The version history lists what each build changed. We are aiming for version 1.0 in late November 2026, if the tuning and the testers agree.

The itch.io page is where the downloads and the feedback live.

Credits

Most icons in the game are from game-icons.net (CC BY 3.0, licence). Thank you to their authors:

• Delapouite: coins, wood-stick, chest-armor, person, book-cover, bank, horse-head, water-flask, horseshoe, bread, bed, old-wagon, park-bench, carrot, weight-scale, ring, cargo-crate, round-straw-bale, blanket, pillow, bear-head, night-sleep, speedometer, tower-flag, shop, castle, hand-bag, backpack, saddle, wood-club, secret-book, rule-book, book-pile, waterskin, cowboy-boot, oil-can, wood-pile, stone-pile, herbs-bundle, wool, rolled-cloth, double-fish, grain-bundle, nest-eggs, fur-shirt, cotton-flower, flax, clay-brick, coal-pile, animal-hide, reed, honey-jar, hemp, wax-tablet, sand-castle, planks, brick-wall, flour, wine-bottle, rope-coil, cloth-jar, candles, glass-ball
• Faithtoken: ore
• John Redman: rock, paper
• Lorc: knapsack, flat-star, power-lightning, chicken-leg, plain-dagger, barbed-spear, boots, run, beer-stein, anvil, lantern, gems, wine-glass, tied-scroll, treasure-map, hourglass, paw-print, hand, whip, medal, quill, spectacles, bowie-knife, hammer-nails, footprint, ringing-bell, dove, bandage-roll, whiplash, shiny-purse, magic-swirl, trade, swap-bag, hood, robe, gem-pendant, owl, leather-vest, armor-vest, open-book, sliced-bread, meat, hot-spices, metal-bar, salt-shaker, grapes, acorn, shiny-apple, thrown-charcoal, ink-swirl, nails
• Sbed: water-drop, shield
• Willdabeast: chain-mail
• caro-asercion: round-potion
• lucasms: cloak
• skoll: hearts, gladius

3D models are CC0 packs by Quaternius, Kenney and KayKit (see the asset list in the repository).